The Vitamin of Last Resort

The corporate pyramid scheme that Elena had spent fifteen years climbing finally revealed itself for what it was: not a ladder, but a tomb. At forty-two, she sat in her corner office on the thirty-seventh floor, staring at the amber bottle of vitamins her doctor had prescribed—something about stress management, something about her body's betrayal.

"You look like shit," Marcus said, leaning against her doorframe. He was twenty-eight, wearing a suit that cost more than her first car, radiating that terrifying confidence of the unburned. "Bull market's ending, El. The bear's coming to hibernate."

She palmed the vitamin—cherry orange flavor, artificial as the promises that had brought her here. "Don't quote your trading app at me, Marcus."

He laughed, but she heard the nervous edge. Everyone was hearing nervous edges these days. The company's stock chart looked like a cliff edge in reverse. Up and up and up, until the laws of economics remembered they existed.

"My grandfather kept bulls," he said unexpectedly. "Real ones. In Spain. He said the trick wasn't strength. It was knowing when to stop charging."

Elena swallowed the vitamin without water. "Your grandfather ever lose anything?"

"Everything. Twice. But he died smiling."

The orange sunset through her window caught the dust motes dancing in the air—particles of fifteen years of compromised ethics, of promotions earned over drinks with men who didn't remember her name, of the small deaths that accumulated before the big one took you.

"I'm going to leave," she said. The words felt foreign in her mouth, a language she'd forgotten she spoke.

Marcus straightened. "What?"

"The pyramid. I'm walking away from it. Before it buries me." She stood up, her joints reminding her she wasn't twenty-eight anymore. "Your grandfather was right about the bulls."

She left her vitamins on the desk. Let the next CEO stress-eat them.